FROM the EDITORS:

IMPORTANT INFORMATION:Opinions expressed on the Insight Scoop weblog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Ignatius Press. Links on this weblog to articles do not necessarily imply agreement by the author or by Ignatius Press with the contents of the articles. Links are provided to foster discussion of important issues. Readers should make their own evaluations of the contents of such articles.

The funniest line of the day...

I think there is more evidence of God’s existence than there is of revenue from this movie. In fact, how could you say the movie exists if nobody’s ever seen it, huh…huh?

This really just goes to show that atheists can make movies just as bad as Christians -and let’s face it there’s been some reeeeaaaallly bad Christian movies. But at least Christians make bad movies because they mean well, atheists don’t even have that excuse. The thing is that this movie was every bit as religious as some of the preachiest Christian movies, they just don’t know it.

Dead atheists would turn over in their graves if they hadn’t evaporated into nothingness. But it’s just what I’ve always suspected, many atheists bore even themselves.

This movie couldn’t pull the atheists out of Catholic comboxes for even 90 minutes.

Ha! Actually, there are several funny lines there, but the last sentence above is the one I had in mind.

Indeed, there have been some tremendously bad Christian movies. My "favorite" all-time horrible Christian flick is the first "Left Behind" movie, which carried on an, um, rich tradition of earnest, tin-eared, deadly serious, cringe-a-minute End Times movies that has thrived in fundamentalist circles since the 1970s. And it was horrible despite having a reported budget of several million (it actually made a profit, however, unlike "The Ledge"). To be fair, Kirk Cameron gave a rousing performance as Kirk Cameron, who soon realized it was easier to simply be Kirk Cameron than to play Kirk Cameron.

Speaking of fundamentalism, Archbold makes a good point about atheism—especially the strident, Christian-bashing atheism that has gotten so much attention in recent years—that corresponds well with a key characteristic of fundamentalism:

I think one of the things that went wrong with this movie isn’t just that it was an atheist movie. It’s that it was anti-Christian. Instead of showing atheists dealing with dramatic situations which they do, the director chose to have the atheist in a battle with a crazy Christian caricature. And guess what, people in a mainly Christian country decided not to see it. Now that’s the kind of natural selection I can get behind.

The connection, or parallel, is that most atheists and fundamentalists define themselves primarily by what they aren't; their identity is often overwhelmingly presented, often unwittingly, in negative terms: "I'm not Christian!" and "I'm not Catholic!" and "I don't believe in God!" and "I don't follow the Catholic Church, or follow the Pope, or pray to Mary, etc.!" Historically, fundamentalism was a reaction against certain presuppositions and perspectives that shaped modernity and gave rise to liberal (aka, heretical) Christianity, notably anti-supernaturalism and hyper-scientism. But it was also very much in opposition to "Romanism", a bent that has continued wholesale to this day. The so-called "new atheism" is almost entirely reactionary; in fact, it by necessity has to be as it has nothing really positive or affirming to offer except that it (take your pick) isn't Christian, isn't beholden to God, isn't trapped by traditional morality, and so forth. In this way, such atheism is, put bluntly, adolescent in both content and tone, for it rarely takes seriously the arguments of those who came before (that is, Christian philosophers and theologians), nor offers any measure of respect for ideas and beliefs that have shaped Western civilization over the centuries.

So many atheists are, in short, rebels without a cause. And now, apparently, they are moviemakers without an audience.